Back from JournalFest!

I just got back from teaching two full days of workshops at JournalFest in Port Townsend, Washington. JournalFest is the smaller sister festival to ArtFest, and focuses on the journaling arts. This was it's first year! My students were all amazing and it was a huge pleasure to get to spend time with two open and willing groups of great people. The above photo is something silly I did with my students to demonstrate that art is both a conjuring trick and a disappearing act. Thanks for being willing to get a little weird everyone! I hope you all had as much fun as me!

The class was entitled Words and Pictures. It focused on spontaneous drawing as a way to uncover your own inner-dialogue, then using that dialogue to inspire more drawings, which then opens up a new level of dialogue. More and more I see making art as a form of listening. The art speaks, I listen. The picture above is a section of the huge, detailed doodle I did as part of my preparation for the class. Working on this doodle actually lead to a huge breakthrough for me and I was fially able to clearly write the first chapter to the story I've been struggling with. Now that I'm home, I'm going to be drawing pages as full time as possible. The big doodle will most likely end up being part of the title page art.